In 2012, Charlot Magayi was living in Mukuru, a large settlement in Kenya’s capital city Nairobi, when a boiling cookstove in her house tipped over and burned her two-year-old child. “I thought, what could I have done differently? What could I have done better?” she says.
Ironically, it was through her job selling charcoal for such cookstoves that she found the answer. With her earnings, Magayi went to adult school, where she learned about the ill effects of cookstoves on health – not just the devastating burns they inflict, but the more pernicious harms caused by cooking smoke, which can lead to lung and heart disorders and eventually death. Suddenly, the respiratory infections she and her daughter had suffered over the years made sense. “Let me put it into context: using a cookstove in a household with children is equivalent to a five-year-old smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” says Magayi, now 28.
Every year, almost four million people die from complications relating to smoke inhalation from open fires and inefficient cookstoves – the main cooking and heating methods for three billion people globally. In Kenya alone, indoor air pollution causes over 21,000 annual deaths, triggered by tiny particles that become airborne when people burn wood, charcoal, kerosene and other fuels. These are symptoms of an incomplete burn, and when they become concentrated indoors and are inhaled, they move deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing lung cancers, strokes, heart disease and pneumonia – all potentially fatal.
The accumulated smoke of billions of cookstoves also carries a grave environmental cost. The plumes belch methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as a substance called black carbon – the source of those pernicious particles. Black carbon is especially damaging, because its ability to absorb light and heat gives it a climate warming impact up to 1,500 times greater than CO2. Carried by wind, some of it is deposited at the poles, where it coats glacial ice and reduces its climate-cooling reflective power. Combined with the effects of smoke, climate non-profit Project Drawdown calculates that the emissions generated by deforestation for wood and charcoal fuel contributes two to five per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s roughly equivalent to the emissions generated by the aviation industry each year.
Against this backdrop, “clean cooking is one of the most overlooked climate solutions there is,” says Kip Patrick, senior director of advocacy and communications at the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA), a United Nations-backed non-profit organisation that promotes low-impact cooking technologies worldwide. As an issue with many contributing factors and outcomes, including health, environment and gender equality, cooking pollution “sort of gets orphaned around,” Patrick says. “But what we’re trying to do is ensure that all of these groups come together to realise that they won’t reach their goals unless they address the cooking issue.”
The cookstove’s position at the intersection of these issues is something that Magayi grasped early on. In 2015, she developed a cookstove prototype that was not only more stable in order to prevent burns, but also reduced smoke by burning more efficiently. With this prototype she launched her business, Mukuru Clean Stoves. Today, Magayi’s stoves use 60 per cent less fuel, reduce pollution by up to 90 per cent, and have delivered clean cooking to 200,000 Kenyans.
In the first instance, Magayi simply wanted to make a stove that would cut pollution. Her three-layered design features an outer protective pot, into which slots a smaller pot – both made out of metal recycled from used oil barrels. The food is cooked within an inner lining, moulded from a soft sand called mekolite mixed with cement. The secondary metal layer that surrounds that ceramic interior pot is punctured with ventilating holes, which replaces the searing heat of conventional stoves with a slower, more consistent burn. Crucially, this enables the charcoal to burn for longer and more completely, Magayi explains – almost totally eradicating smoke, and limiting the amount of wood fuel that’s required.
However, Magayi soon discovered that simply making an efficient stove wasn’t enough. Women bear a disproportionate share of the health burden of cookstoves; meanwhile illness, and the time required to collect wood to power inefficient stoves, keeps girls away from school, which deepens gender divides. “As I progressed, I realised that rampant household air pollution is tied to women’s empowerment,” Magayi says – and so was the success of her business. To get women – over 90 per cent of whom are the cooks in rural Kenyan households – to switch to her cleaner product, they first needed to be convinced of its benefits. So Magayi partnered with local government organisations in the five districts where her company works, to educate women on the impact of household air pollution, along with its role in local deforestation and climate change.
Magayi also structured her production and supply chain to incorporate her target market. Women are now employed to make the stoves’ ceramic interiors and to distribute the pots, earning a ten per cent commission on the $10 sale of each one.
Next, she’s intent on further minimising the stoves’ environmental impact. “As much as we help to reduce the production of toxic smoke emissions, when families use charcoal they’re still causing deforestation. So, we need to move to something else,” Magayi says. Mukuru Clean Stoves is now working on developing lower-impact, cleaner-burning briquettes made from agricultural waste. In September this year, she launched her first partnership to sell carbon credits to companies that want to offset their carbon footprints.
Similar to tree-planting or mangrove restoration projects, which sell credits based on the greenhouse gas emissions that are reduced by their activities, this is a growing trend in cleaner cooking. Digital monitoring technologies make it easier to track exactly how much cleaner cookstoves are, Patrick explains. “It’s allowing us to give businesses the confidence that these are offsets that work, and that they deliver impact not only on climate, but also on health and women’s empowerment.”
Now, Magayi has launched a new venture called the Mukuru Clean Stove Foundation, to draw the connection between resource use and the environment through educational programmes focusing on reforestation and climate change awareness. “I keep going, because I know we haven’t reached a point where we’ve innovated enough to completely solve this problem,” she says.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
